To Look Without Capturing: Toward a Radical Tactile Gaze

Tuesday, April 1, 2025

There is a violence in the way we look.

We’ve been taught to look in order to consume, to extract, to master. The gaze has been instrumentalized — turned into a colonizing device, a cold scan for value, for sex, for data. But what if the gaze could become something else? What if it could touch instead of seize? What if it could be guided by consent, not hunger?

Laura U. Marks speaks of haptic visuality— a way of seeing that is not distant, but embodied. A way of perceiving that does not separate the eye from the skin, the thought from the body. This tactile gaze moves like a caress. It doesn’t seek to know everything. It senses, it hesitates, it feels. It doesn’t reduce the other to an object; it becomes part of the same atmosphere. Like fog, or memory.

But I want to go further.

To adopt a tactile gaze is not merely aesthetic — it is a political act. It is a choice to stop watching pornography. To stop staring at women who have become alienated from themselves through surgical modification, through hypersexual posturing, through the routines of commodified sex. This is not a moral judgment — it is a refusal to participate in the economy of objectification. When I look at someone, it must be with their consent. Not only verbal, but somatic. A shared field of presence. A silent yes that vibrates in the space between us.

I have long been haunted by Levinas’ ethics of the face: the idea that the face of the Other demands responsibility. That to truly see someone is to not reduce them. But I want to radicalize this further: to see someone ethically means to not even “see” them in the dominant sense — to not decode, interpret, or desire them in the terms given to us by patriarchy or capitalism.

Instead, I propose a shift: from “seeing” to feeling-with.

The tactile gaze is not a passive softness — it is a disciplined attention. It resists the reflex to consume, to possess, to eroticize. It is a form of perception that touches without taking. That listens through the body. That waits for the other to appear, not as a product, but as a presence. And this form of presence is so rare today — so unmarketable — that it becomes revolutionary.

We must unlearn the gaze.

We must dismantle the internalized pornographic eye — the one that still, even subtly, scans for desirability, for youth, for legibility. We must become fugitives of the visual economy. Not blind, but radically attentive. We must feel our gaze from the inside — and be willing to withdraw it when it is not welcome. This is the new erotic: a gaze that never steals, but communes.

We need to build a different grammar of attention.

One that does not separate thought from flesh. One where touch does not require hands, but begins in the eyes — if the eyes can remember how to feel. If the gaze can become porous, and lose its power.

Only then can we begin to reimagine intimacy. Only then can we stop reproducing the old scripts of domination and display. And only then can the other stop being a projection screen — and start being.

My previous article on the Ethics of the Gaze here